Hacker News Reader

Comment by sf4lifer | Hacker News Reader

In the last decade, the (stock and private) markets rewarded growth (not profitability). Operators were not compensated on efficiency or revenue per employee. There was no expectations of dividends or profit. As a matter of fact massive spend for growth drove stock prices higher so that's what everyone did. Jack was complicit in this ultimately bearing responsibility however this was the status quo in the growth at all costs era of tech.

View on HN

Sadly seems to be the way of the world in general.

Growth at all costs.

Heck even if you grow at a smaller percentage of what you grew by the year before the markets get spooked and the headlines of doom begin, even for companies doing insane numbers.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” —- Edward Abbey

Not the way of the world, but the way of the world in a zero interest rate environment.

Every tech company hires aggressively in a low interest rate environment for two reasons.

1. Money is cheap 2. Bonds return negative yields so all the money flows into risk assets that grow aggressively. Profits don't matter in this environment.

Those that weren't in the workforce prior to 2008 will now learn the importance of profit as interest rates rise to rates we haven't seen in decades.

Also, Jack deserves credit for roping in Elon and selling Twitter at $44B at peak market. Every employee (with stock options) got some of that upside. Assuming the $4M per day loss is accurate, any CEO would be forced to make cuts in this economic environment. I credit Elon for doing it all at once rather than doing a cascading series of layoffs. That said, I feel for everyone who lost their job...

> rather than doing a cascading series of layoffs

That has yet to be seen...

The rumour is that a significant part of the losses is that Elon spooked advertisers, so their ad spend dropped off a cliff. So what was a marginal advertising platform last years is a massive mess now.

Oh and Musk used something >$10Bn worth of loans to buy twitter, so they immediately have a new $1bn/year interest payment to make. That's 3 mil a day alone (check my maths).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/technology/twitter-first-...

Twitter was profitable before this happened, even with the increased headcount. It seems like all the loans Elon took out put a noose around Twitter for no benefit to the platform at all.

Yah. Buying a platform for 4X it's worth in a leveraged buy-out, antagonizing it's primary revenue source while firing half it's staff to roll-out a monetization strategy that 80%+ of 1M+ respondents said they don't want isn't exactly an inspiring start.

Should we expect H-1B visas to stop being renewed?

If you look at it dispassionately, it would seem that a lot of colleages would be rightly worried about this happening.

Why would we continue to renew H-1B visas if citizens need those jobs?

I doubt the Govt would legislate anything unless there is a sustained multi-year depression. They won't be able to react with new laws in a short time (at least under Biden and democratic congress). Whether companies will opt to hire H-1Bs or citizens is likely a cost decision. Existing employed H-1B renewals is totally dependent on company/individual performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com